


Five times Donovan could've told Luan he loved him, and one time he's glad he never did.

by whittler_of_words



Category: Shovel Knight
Genre: Beeest of both worlds, Canon Compliant, Developing Relationship, Implied/Referenced Character Death, M/M, Mild Angst, Post-Canon, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-05
Updated: 2018-02-05
Packaged: 2019-03-13 19:59:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,569
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13577904
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/whittler_of_words/pseuds/whittler_of_words
Summary: Snapshots in time. Fleeting, imperfect.You take your best friend for granted and learn to regret it.





	Five times Donovan could've told Luan he loved him, and one time he's glad he never did.

i.

The valley has always been a warm and welcoming place. You have never trusted places like that, and you sweep a clinical eye over the rolling hills, mentally mapping out a path and wondering how many pests are lying in wait for unsuspecting travelers to pass by. Pests including: dragons, blorbs, skeletons, and Knights. 

You’re not including yourself as an unsuspecting traveler. 

“Might as well set up camp here.” Luan heaves a great big sigh. “Be getting dark out soon.”

“There’s no place nearby that isn’t so wide open?”

You’ve never been through this stretch of the plains before. Luan doesn’t quite smile, but there’s sympathy in the shape his lips make when he says, “Not for another couple hours of walking, but it’s just past a cliff-face that’s impassable at night. It’s best to stop now.”

Not the answer you’d been hoping for, but you accept it nonetheless. Setting up camp is routine, and soon enough you have a fire going that’ll ward off any wandering creatures. Sitting across from him, at least, is already becoming familiar regardless of where your travels take you.

“If you’d asked me a year ago,” you mutter, “two years ago, where I thought I’d end up, playing fetch for some curio hoarding noblewoman wouldn’t have been among the first ten things to cross my mind.”

Luan snorts. “But would this come before or after escorting a children’s school trip through infested caverns?”

“God.” You press your palm into your eyes. “I thought I told you to never remind me of that again.”

Luan laughs. It has you looking up when he says, mischievous look in his eyes, “You would trust a thief? And here your reputation told you to be cunning, Donovan.”

_I would trust you,_ you think. It’s gone in an instant, defying rational thought. You wonder what expression might have crossed your face and are glad you haven’t yet taken off your mask.

“And what else has my reputation told you?” you muse, arching an eyebrow that you know he’ll see even in the low firelight.

His answering smile is wry. “Enough.”

ii.

The first time you meet Reize, he’s barely more than a toddler. Luan sits next to him where he’s resting fitfully on the bed, whining of an ache and shivering from a fever. You’d tried to maintain some sort of respectful distance from the next room, giving them a semblance of privacy, but your curiosity has always tended to get the better of you.

“Thank you again for coming on such short notice.” The voice that draws you away from where you’d been peering around the doorframe belongs to the woman of the house. She considers you with anxious eyes. “Normally my wife would be more than capable of handling this, but she’s in the village over on a house call, and I’m no good with sick people myself. He was askin’ for his father all night.”

You’d been wondering if the child wasn’t another kind of relative, but her words confirm it. “He lives here with you?”

“Only sometimes, when Luan can’t take Reize with him when he goes adventuring.”

“It’s a dangerous business,” you agree.

Something about the way you say that has her looking at you differently. “You and Luan are friends?”

“Partners,” you correct, and the way she tilts her head at the word has you crossing your arms.

“Hm.”

She takes mercy on you, or at least has better things to do, because she leaves you alone after that, retreating into some other part of the house. Luan emerges from the room not terribly long after, looking less tired than you expected; then again, the lines etched into his face are already permanent.

“You didn’t have to come with me,” he says.

“I know,” you reply. There’s nothing for him to say to that.

There was no use staying behind. It’s not as if you could have finished the job yourself.

Not easily, anyway.

“Might take a day or two.” And you can see it now, the tiredness you couldn’t before. He tugs at his beard and frowns. You realize suddenly he’s lost his scarf between entering the room and exiting it. “His magic’s coming in. I was wondering if it might - he’s about that age.”

“Run in the family?”

Something about the solemn way he looks toward the door where his sleeping son lays makes you regret asking when he responds, “In a manner of speaking.”

You could push, if you wanted. You don’t doubt Luan would tell you if you asked.

“Your friend heated some water for tea,” you say instead. “It should still be warm, I think.”

A tension you hadn’t thought to recognize eases from your shoulders when he chuckles. “The woman knows me too well. You’re having a cup.”

“What, I don’t get a choice?”

“Hell no,” he says, and there’s nothing for you to say to that either.

iii.

The hideout is nice. Being in such a secluded and easily guarded corner of the Lich Yard makes it worth having to take extra measures against flooding, and the cold, and it’s not often you can find a place that makes it easier to relax instead of the opposite. A “home base” is hardly something you can say you’ve had too many times in the past. Especially one so quiet.

Most of the time.

Luan’s been muttering to himself for an hour. He’d said something earlier about a map one of his acquaintances had passed on to him, riddled with a strange code, but that was all he said before he’d spread it out over the table and become absorbed in his work. And grown more and more agitated as time passed.

You’ve never heard someone threaten a piece of paper before, but you suppose there’s a first time for everything.

This would be about the time where you should offer to help, but you know that any code giving Luan trouble would be likely to run you in even wider circles. You peer around the book in your hands instead.

Luan is hanging off the table. Well.

He’s frowning. Thunderously, at the map he’s holding in front of himself, presumably also upside-down. You remember some phrase about turning a frown around and nearly can’t bite down on a snicker in time; is this part of his process? 

He mutters again. Brings the map a little closer to his face. You look back to your own book before he can notice you staring, smiling to yourself. You might offer your help anyway, but you think you’ll wait a minute before you do.

iv.

“One of my old friends from the guild has been hounding me,” Luan mutters, “something about _retirement plans_ and the like, if you can believe it.”

“Was that what the other day was about?” you hazard. “The folk who’d thrown a papercraft at you in the square?” Luan had done nothing more than turn the other way with a twitch in his eye, not pausing to address it. You’d actually almost forgotten about it already.

“That’d be the one. Apparently I’ll be getting too old for all of _this_ soon,” he says, gesturing around the tavern, and you know well to guess he isn’t talking about the food and drink. “Am old enough, already,” he amends.

“As am I,” you snort. “I suspect I’ll be doing this until my last breath regardless.” Makes you glad you never shacked up with any guilds, with their insurances and plans and strings all attached.

“You’ve certainly aged well enough,” Luan retorts.

“Don’t be ridiculous. You’ve aged just fine,” you scoff, waving a hand when Luan looks like he’s about to interrupt. “You have laugh lines and my hair’s turning gray. The way I see it, time hasn’t done either of us any favors.”

You’d laugh at the face Luan is making if you weren’t surrounded by strangers. “ _You_ have gray hair,” he remarks, incredulous.

“Why do you think I wear this thing everywhere? For the fashion statement?” you start, tugging on your hood. Luan opens his mouth. “Don’t answer that.”

He has the good sense to look sheepish before he continues to something else. “Regardless of all that, I’m still worried.”

“About what?” The two of you both ordered something to drink when you came in, but yours is largely untouched. You feel bad about how much of it is going to waste. Maybe you should offer the rest to Luan when this is done. “If that friend of yours is bothering you so much, I can chase them off.”

“It’s Reize,” Luan says, and the frankness with which he does so immediately takes you back.

You keep forgetting that it’s really not just the two of you, in the grand scheme of things.

“I know I’m getting old,” Luan says, “but I’m worried that when the time comes, he won’t be old enough.” He pauses. “Or that I won’t have done enough for him.”

“No one who knows you would think that,” you protest. “Certainly not Reize.”

“That doesn’t change that there will be a time where he’ll need me, and I won’t be there.”

A voice carries over the background chatter. Your mark must have walked in while you were distracted by the conversation, sitting now at the bar without a care in the world. Luan catches your drink when you slide it to him across the table.

“We’ll figure something out.” There’s no more time to talk, but you say this last thing anyway. “For now, just take it one day at a time.”

He downs the drink, and then you get to work.

v.

“Holy shit,” you breathe, “did we really just do that?”

“We did.” Luan is as out of breath as you are, but he still has enough left in him to bellow out a laugh, hunched over his chair. “We did. We’re doing it.”

“However long I’ve been doing this,” you say, “I’ve never stolen _chairs_ before.”

They’re good chairs, to your credit. As sturdy as they are ornate, and the care with which the wood has been carved and furnished and waxed is certainly nothing to scoff at. And they’re heavy. Which is why you’re both camped out behind a barn in the middle of the night with a couple of goddamn chairs.

“That nobleman surely won’t miss them,” Luan snickers. “Did you see how many he had up there? Who even needs all of that?”

“He should be thanking us for taking them off his hands.” Looking over the one you’re leaning on, you’re bewildered again by how expensive it must have been to commission. “Gives him an excuse to buy more.”

Luan takes the initiative to sit in his, regardless of the fact that it’s dark and you’re practically out in the open, not yet a mile out from the nobleman’s estate. But seeing him in it, expensive red fabric on soft cushions framed by fine cedar, only confirms what you’d thought before.

It suits him.

“These were practically made for us.” Luan echoes your thoughts. “They’re even our colors,” he says, nodding to the chair you took; blue, and simpler than Luan’s, though suffering no less expense for it, no doubt. “What do you think?”

“This was the best decision I’ve ever made,” you say.

It comes out without you really thinking about it. You can practically see the “stealing a couple of chairs?” radiating off of the face he’s giving you, but it doesn’t take much longer than that for you to realize you mean it. 

You can’t think of any other place you want to be except here.

Luan smiles. “I think I’m inclined to agree.”

You only stop leaning on the chair long enough to sit in it too.

[ ]

The valley is spread out before you like a book. You’ve dog-eared its pages so many times that you hardly need to look to find a crease; bookmarks are too easily lost, and you will not let yourself forget.

The rubble at your feet juts from the ground like several gravestones, stacked one on top of the other.

You will not let yourself forget.

“I know you’re dead, but that doesn’t mean you’ve got to haunt the place.”

You don’t say anything. Red joins you up the path, stopping beside you. 

“The tower is gone,” he says, not waiting for you to make up your mind to speak. “As are all the responsibilities and burdens that came with it. Why are you still here, my friend?”

His bluntness startles you. Then again, you suppose there’s no need to talk in circles anymore, lest the wrong person overhears.

“...Right now, I can’t stand the thought of being anywhere else,” you admit. 

“Hm,” he says. “Scarlet and I settled into a nice place in the Lich Yard a while back. You know you’re welcome there any time.”

“Thank you, Red.”

Maybe he can tell you want to be left alone, because after a moment of not saying anything else, he tips his hat towards you, backing away down the trail. You could only guess why he followed you -- how he knew you’d still be here in the first place -- and you’re not sure whether you should be grateful or not.

You’re itching to warp up to the parapet. Years of going there to think have made it a habit, but now it’s nothing more than a broken one, crumbled over the dirt with all the rest. If only you could have saved that one piece.

Even though you know that’s selfish of you. You just never really understood how much it meant that it was the last place you saw Luan alive before everything went to hell.

Letting yourself float, you sweep over the wreckage. You could almost convince yourself that you recognize some of the bricks here and there; that one was used as a halfway mark in Horace’s challenge; this one was the wing of the gargoyle that Plague Knight tried to animate once; those were the ones that crushed your ribs when you fell. It’s all very dramatic.

“Christ,” you mutter to no one in particular. “You’d make so much fun of me if you could hear what I’m thinking now.”

You can almost hear his laugh. How he’d roll his eyes and tell you to lighten up. He’d pretend to take it lightly, but he was a strategist; he’d come back to you not five minutes later with a plan of action. 

“My brains and your muscle?” he’d say, leaning into the joke. “Working together we almost make a functional human being.”

“Shit,” you mutter, again. You promised yourself years ago that you would stop letting yourself get lost in the past. That you couldn’t afford to; that you would focus on moving forward, and keeping the few people you had left safe. But now?

The Enchantress is gone. The Tower is gone. By all rights, the Valley is safer than it’s been in a long time.

Where does that leave you?

You settle down on a larger piece of rubble. It, at least, is solid, grounding in more way than one, and looking up at the blue sky, you’ve never felt more at home and more ridiculously out of place in your life.

If you’re grateful for one thing, it’s that you betrayed Luan as nothing more than a friend.

**Author's Note:**

> Sometimes u dont realize youve got a crush on your bestie until after youve killed them and thats just how it is


End file.
